Mark Lanctot;141978 Wrote: > I believe 6-channel PCM can't be transmitted over S/PDIF due to > insufficient bandwidth. I had a feeling that might be the case; I think I remember reading that S/PDIF had insufficient bandwidth for DVD-Audio also.
> Unfortunately that leaves this sort of multichannel support for the > Squeezebox high and dry. It can't transmit anything other than > 2-channel PCM over S/PDIF and since surround MP3 isn't contained in a > specially-encoded 2-channel PCM stream like DD and DTS, it can't be > passed to a receiver, even if the receiver could decode such a stream. But might it not be possible to encode streams other than AC3/DTS in the same way? For example, this S/PDIF information mentions MPEG audio as one possible thing to put into the stream (although it might be speculative): http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.html And indeed it seems that Harmon Kardon produce an amp capable of receiving MP3s over S/PDIF: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=23822 Of course, the existing players will only be able to produce stereo from the new MP3 Surround files, but if we could wrap up an MP3 in the same way we can wrap an AC3 or DTS file, we might still be able to transmit it to a suitable receiver. (I wonder if anybody other than HK make such a thing?) And if we can transmit a stereo MP3 to a receiver, I'd imagine that adding support for MP3 Surround would be fairly easy, should a receiver come to exist which can support it. Transformed MP3s would almost certainly be as big as their decompressed stereo-WAV equivalents, but would compress well to FLAC due to all the padding (going by the way AC3/DTS behaves). Unfortunately my receiver can't take MP3 files, but it would certainly be interesting to get this going. And if it could be made to work, the SB2/3 firmware could probably do it for us. -- smst ------------------------------------------------------------------------ smst's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=752 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28112 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
